100 Bullets Update

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The comic favorite is blossoming into a full featured game.

By IGN Staff

"If you could get away with murder, would you?" That's the question posed by writer, Brian Azzurello. The DC writer's original story (he's credited with work on both Batman and Superman), 100 Bullets will go from comic book pages to PlayStation 2 and Xbox this year. For lack of a better comparison, 100 Bullets is another take on the run-and-gun action genre made very popular by the likes of one Max Payne and, to a lesser degree, Jack Slate.

The main difference in 100 Bullets versus its contemporary progenitors is that the main characters, Cole Burns, Agent Graves and Snow Falls (yeah, Azzurello is a fan of the pun) aren't exactly upstanding citizens. Graves, for one, facilitates revenge schemes by offering those in need of vengeance with a way to do it and a way out of the repercussions, that is, immunity. Cole and Snow, on the other hand, are part of a shady group of assassins.

Storyline aside, thus far, 100 Bullets looks to be another potential solid play in the genre. It's being developed simultaneously for Xbox and PS2; Acclaim told us that the game will look more or less the same on both consoles. Our guess is that Xbox offer may inch out the PS2 version, if only marginally. Particle effects, secondary animations and other goodies do need to be finalized, but there's still a decent amount of time for polish. For those interested in nerd-speak, the game run's on the second generation of the same rendering engine used on Vex, Turok and The Red Star.

But we all know that a large draw for games of this type is an involving storyline and gameplay to match. From the early demo we saw, the team has put in a good amount of effort into giving the environment every bit of interactivity. Shoot a street signal and it'll fall down, hopefully, landing squarely on some nasty thug. This is only a touch of what can occur; there are also scripted-events, like not-so-random cars crashing through walls to take you out.